Feminist rescue politics forces Muslim women into a double bind of culture and bombs

Evidence

I want to end with a quote from Saba Mahmood that both raises important questions and offers an answer of sorts: … Does the confidence of our political vision as feminists ever run up against the responsibility that we incur for the destruction of life forms so that “unenlightedned” women may be taught to live more freely? Do we fully comprehend the forms of life that we want to so passionately to remake so that Muslim women and men may live a more enlightened existence? … Would an intimate knowledge of life worlds that are distinct from, and perhaps even opposed to, our cosmopolitan lifestyles ever lead us to question the certainty with which we prescribe what is good for all humanity? At a time when feminist and democratic politics run the danger of being reduced to a rhetorical display on the placard of Islam’s abuses, these questions offer the slim hope that perhaps a dialogue across political and religious differences … can yield a vision of coexistence that does not require making certain life worlds extinct or provisional. It requires us to entertain the possibility … that one does not always know what one opposes and that a political vision at times has to admit its own finitude in order to even comprehend what it has sought to oppose. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 585 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Gender operates as a kind of technology of empire enabling the West to make the case for its own modernity and for its civilizational projects around the globe. Where gender is relied upon in this way, Muslim women find themselves stranded between the patriarchs of their own community and the empire’s bombs. That is, either we accept the diagnosis that our cultures and our men are barbaric and take the cure (the bombs on our heads and the camps), or we endure patriarchal violence. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 58 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Well-meaning feminist rescue of Muslim women can itself destroy life worlds — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 585; Feminist rescue of Muslim women masks the West’s containment of immigrants — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 292; Muslim women are trapped between their own community’s patriarchs and empire’s bombs. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 58 (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Well-meaning feminist rescue of Muslim women can itself destroy life worlds #corroborates (0.95) — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 585
• Muslim women are trapped between their own community’s patriarchs and empire’s bombs. #corroborates (0.93) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 58